Still, they taste a bit of blood

Soul of a grumpy uncle, body of a thirty-something Canadian. Current grad student. Future lighthouse keeper.

[naogardunoyou]

Bigger Trees Near Warter, David Hockney, 2007, oil on 50 canvases, 4.6m x 12m.

[mediumsweettea]

tweet of all time. truly

[cuppydogshane]

that is actually my main principle of explicit fic is that the personalities stay On during sex.

[mun-sal-vache]

Sir Orfeo, illustrated by Errol le Cain. 

[talesfromthecrypts]

Walking backwards into my future.

Mārama (2025) dir. by Toa Stappard

[tragedyprotagonist]

I'm forcing my sister to watch black sails and she hates flint (gates pushed her over the edge) so much lmfao. She says she doesn't give a fuck what his motivations are there's no way they could be good enough for her unless. and I quote. "he's doing it all for the gays or something"

[riverlarking]

i love clicking on somebody’s ao3 profile and seeing the most nonsensical collection of fandoms. like yess let's live a thousand lifetimes

[bonfires-n-hares]

source

[the-etcetera-archive]

Source: Water Lily in Sunlight; John La Farge, ca. 1883. American Art Museum.

[jojotichakorn]

bro, i desperately need people to learn that romance is an actual, literal genre of fiction. if you do not like a complete focus on romance and only like romantic plotlines incorporated into various other plots - you do not like the romance genre and you are not interested in romance fiction. simple as that. and it's fine if you don't like it, but pretending like the entire genre doesn't exist and is actually all badly written fiction of other genres which is overly focused on romance is asinine. yet somehow continues being a sentiment i see all the time. romance fiction is not lacking in plot or over-concerned with romantic relationships - it's literally doing what it was designed to do: centers mostly or even exclusively around romance.

[gacougnol]

David Hockney (British, born 1937)

[unusual-suspects]

x

[sophsun1]

Ladyhawke (1985) dir. Richard Donner

[tobermoriansass]

Which is also to say I don't care about historical accuracy in the way everyone goes on abt it vis a vis outfits and the trappings of language and our (whiggish, but essentially false) imagining of historical norms, bc that thinking has produced our annoying present in which signs (fashions) exist without signifiers (the socio-political structures & conditions that make those fashions possible) and I hate it and also think it is doing active harm to historical fiction as a genre.

[fractally]

Re: shane and race I also think it is very significant that he is at least a second generation if not third generation Canadian and his cultural identity appears to be Canadian, which is a different experience than a first generation immigrant who still has more direct connections to his family's country/culture of origin.

Shane has plenty of canon struggles that are inferesting, possibly including a unique set of circumstances since he is biracial. But lots of fandom doesn't seem to know how to approach it? Like they want it to be the experience of a poor black kid in Jim Crow South USA with abusive parents rather than an upper middle class Canadian wasian boy raised in what appears to be a supportive home with parents who had a healthy marriage.

That may sound crass. I dont think the story of a poor black kid in Jim Crow South USA is not worth telling, but it's not what HR is lol. I also don't think it's black fans doing this.

No anon I totally agree.

Your first paragraph is why I emphasize Shane's Wasian identity so strongly, and why I always get a bit irritated by fics that have Shane eating mostly Japanese food or speaking Japanese it's just like....that's not realistic. Maybe *some* third gen immigration families keep the culture that strong, but Shane is mixed race and he's involved in a very white sport from a young age...I do not think he's having a Japanese upbringing in literally any sense of the word. Everything points to Shane having an extremely normative Canadian upbringing, with the added annoying wrinkle of having people constantly ask him where he gets his looks (Ilya....)

I defend Reid's writing on Shane's inner monologue because I think with Shane's circumstances it completely makes sense he doesn't think about being wasian much. I do think the press would be annoying about it, the same way they are about Suzuki, and Shane might have thoughts and feelings about that, which doesn't come up in HR (media barely comes up at all). I do think there's a missed opportunity to tie this into tripgate, like Montreal sports press were always kind of assholes about Shane as captain, seeing him as weak or as an outsider (being from all of two hours away....) and then seizing the opportunity to rake him over the coals for tripgate.

But yeah with fandom...I don't know. There's a lot of dynamics going on, most of which I will decline to comment on because they'll Get Me. But I do think there's a lack of imagination about what race is like beyond the most directly communicated stuff, and BLM was very successful at finally getting white Americans to consider the experience of black Americans.

But like, most cities (including Ottawa and Montreal) are very racially diverse, and have a lot of mixed race communities, and the reality of racial dynamics in highly urbanized highly diverse cities is not simple. And I notice that many fans just aren't really interested in that, probably because there's not really so much whump potential. Like people want Shane to be having the worst possible time because they want to whump him. That's kind of the bottom line

[positivestress]

I wish I was a female tiger because then if I was talking to someone and I was getting off topic I could say “but I tigress,” and then kill and eat them because I am a tiger

[greatviolenceonthatthang]

james flint's most endearing trait is that he understands women to be inherently three-dimensional, complex and deserving of respect (especially for the positions of authority they occupy). in contrast, he is barely convinced that most men have brains.